Even by the standards of shocking Michael Jackson jokes, it was a shocking joke. “Michael Jackson did nothing wrong,” Michael Che, a co-anchor of Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update,” said during last night’s episode. “He was right to molest all those kids.” This was delivered with palpable surprise at the words coming out of his mouth, but Che kept going: “They were lucky. I would have paid him to do it.

Roosevelt Montás grew up in a small mountain village in the Dominican Republic. Two days before his 12th birthday, his mother flew him up to New York, where she had found a minimum-wage job in a garment factory. A few years later, when he was a sophomore in high school, some neighbors in his apartment building threw out a bunch of books. One of them was a finely bound volume of Socratic dialogues. Montás snagged it—and Socrates changed his life.

Tender shrub, green leaves of its foliage,
the curl of a baby’s fingernail, knocked
over by storm, its brush crumbling to touch—
how did I miss it—it’s all that I can
do—for those I could not save—but twist
the stubborn bush from its tangled roots
& turn it upright as if giving birth
to a baby in breach. I don’t mind mud
underneath my nails, worms my fingers touch
(they enrich the soil), mosquitos swarming
crazily (it’s one hundred degrees!),
circling my head like a halo of distrust.

Barney Frank might not draw a connection between his coming out as gay nearly four decades ago and his coming out against left-wing dogmatism in the Democratic Party today. But the parallel is unmistakable: The 86-year-old former Democratic congressman from Massachusetts is shining a light on a sensitive subject that many people wish he would keep quiet about.

George Washington has long been something of an American visual cliché. When the Russian diplomat and artist Pavel Svinin visited the United States in the early 19th century, he found it “noteworthy that every American considers it his sacred duty to have a likeness of Washington in his house, just as we have images of God’s Saints.”
Today, the country is no less prone to canonizing versions of patriotism, though they go well beyond art.